Novel Transcript Reading: Ghetto Bastard, by Russell Vann

Ghetto Bastard is a story of survival. Malik was born into these circumstances–with no father to teach him how to be a man, and to a mother who didn’t want him. Malik must navigate his way to adulthood with only the streets as his guide–through the seventies heroin infestation, the eighties crack rage, and the nineties Clinton mass incarceration era, and AIDS epidemic.

Once he becomes a man, his vision broadens, but will it be enough to abandon the very ghetto that created him?

Ghetto Bastard is the intimate journey of an innocent child in search of love and self-worth. He just wants what we all want. And Malik Russell wasn’t born with any ‘quit’, so he’s got that going for him, but neither was his opponent: the ghetto.